... God is a spirit, not a creed;
He is an inner outward-moving power:
.....
He is that one Desire, that life, that breath,
That Soul which, with infinity of pain,
Passes through revelation and through death
Onward and upward to itself again.
Out of the lives of heroes and their deeds,
Out of the miracle of human thought,
Out of the songs of singers, God proceeds;
And of the soul of them his Soul is wrought.
There follows a quick clatter of disputation, broken by the entrance of the philosopher; and the pilgrim's question being put to him, he replies—
God? God! There is no GOD.
Thus 'the spirit that denies' abruptly shatters the poetic vision; and the artistic effect is, correspondingly, to break the music of the previous stanzas with a sudden discord. The design of the work required that the philosopher should be heard, and dramatic fitness suggested that his most effective entrance would be here, rending the fair new synthesis with denial. And the resulting dissonance is inherent in the very scheme of the poem.
That defect does not appear in "The Last Abbot," which is also engaged upon the thought of the universal soul. Here an old monk, knowing that he is drawing near the end of life, quietly talks to the brethren of his order about life and death and after-death. There is no argument, no discussion even. No other voice is raised to interrupt the meditative flow of the old man's message, which is, in fact, a recantation. And, as a consequence, the poem has a unity of serene reflectiveness, rising at times to lyrical ecstasy. He is thinking of his approaching death—
Oh, I, with light and airy change,
Across the azure sky shall range,
When I am dead.
.....